To allow for a more versatile vehicle interior, many vehicle manufacturers provide removable or stowable seats or seat assemblies for their vehicles, such as their sport utility and mini-van vehicles. Generally, removable or stowable seats are arranged as the second and/or third row seats. The removable seat assembly is more versatile because it provides for increased cargo room and flexibility in vehicle usage. Often removable seats can also be adjusted and/or stowed to minimize the volume of space occupied by the seats for similar reasons. However, existing latch mechanisms have the drawback that they will allow the seat to be unlatched from the vehicle floor even while the vehicle seat is in the upright position, such as while being used by a vehicle occupant.
The removable or stowable seat assemblies typically attach to a striker bar or similar structure in a vehicle floor through a latching mechanism. In a typical arrangement, the seat assembly first attaches to a first or front striker bar, generally a right and a left attachment point, and is then rotated to move the latch towards a rear striker in the floor of the vehicle, again generally for attachment on the right and the left. In a stowable seat, the front latches are not designed to be detached by a vehicle user, but merely to serve as a pivot point in stowing the seats. In a removable seat, all of the attachment points are removable.
It is preferable to provide a latch mechanism that can connect the seat to the vehicle floor free from a high engaging effort, a high release effort, and with minimal buzz-squeak-rattle (“BSR”) issues. High engaging and release efforts may arise because the striker bar in the vehicle floor is not in the precise design position relative to the latch mechanism due to tolerances resulting from the manufacturing process, thus a higher force may be needed to engage or disengage the latch with the striker in the floor. The imprecision can also result in a gap in the latch interface and cause BSR issues.
Therefore, to ensure that the removable seat assemblies securely fasten to the vehicle floor without causing squeaks and rattles during vehicle travel, the manufacturers must currently insist on very tight placement tolerances of the front connection relative to the rear connection. These very tight placement tolerances add cost to the vehicle, which is often passed down to the final customer.
Thus, there is a need for a latch mechanism usable in removable vehicle seats that provides greater ability to manage tolerances within the latch in the fore-aft and up-down directions in repeated uses without significantly adding costs to the mechanism. There is also a continued need to provide a latch that will not allow the seat to be unlatched from the vehicle floor when in the upright position.